


Points on the Map

by wormghost



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Dreams, LOTS OF SPOILERS, M/M, Nightmares?, post-TFA
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-19
Updated: 2016-01-19
Packaged: 2018-05-14 22:35:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5761450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wormghost/pseuds/wormghost
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Finn doesn’t know much about the force. It’s too abstract of a concept for him to fully wrap his head around if he’s being honest, the idea that there’s an all-encompassing… thing that runs through all things and connects it all together. It makes his head hurt trying to make sense of it.<br/>He can understand connections, though."</p>
<p>Finn's life post-tfa told partially through dreams</p>
            </blockquote>





	Points on the Map

**Author's Note:**

> i'm new to star wars so go easy on me if i slip up on terminology anywhere in here

Finn wakes up in the medical unit of the Resistance base two weeks and three days after the destruction of Starkiller Base. In the first 24 hours of being awake, he loses count of how many times and how many different ways he’s been told that he’s lucky. Lucky that the wounds on his back are healing so well; Lucky that Kylo Ren’s lightsaber hadn’t cut deep enough to do any permanent damage; Lucky to have gotten treatment in time; Lucky to just be alive. He wants to argue that if he really has such good luck, he wouldn’t have failed to protect his friend when she needed it most. Instead, he just nods and smiles and responds with awkward “thank you”s.

General Organa personally visits Finn as soon as he’s alert enough to retain information and fills him in on everything he’s missed since he so heroically got the snot beaten out of him. Rey had managed to hold her own against Ren and make it off of the planet without Finn’s help (He breathes a sigh of relief), but she’s gone from the base and has been for about a week and a half according to the General. She and the wookiee had left in Han Solo’s old ship with Luke Skywalker’s old droid, following the now completed map to wherever Skywalker is now. Finn feels a pang of regret, wishing he’d been able to say goodbye and good luck. She’s too far out of range by now to communicate with, and he has no way of knowing when he’ll see her again. Wherever she is, Finn hopes that she’s safe.

The General tells him about their victory, commends him on his bravery and thanks him for his help, which only makes him feel painfully insecure. Before he can stop himself, he ends up confessing how he’d lied to get into Starkiller Base. When he’s finished speaking (It feels more like incoherent babbling), the General stares him down for a few seconds, her expression unreadable. Then, to Finn’s surprise, her face softens into an expression of what looks like… understanding?

“Your reasons aren’t important to me. You helped prevent the destruction of the Resistance. As far as I’m concerned, why you did it doesn’t matter.”

“But I lied to your face,” Finn insists, “Doesn’t that make me seem suspicious?”

The General’s expression doesn’t change, “You lied to save your friend, not to aid the First Order. If I thought you were on their side, you would know.”

Part of Finn wants to protest, if only to make sure that the Resistance doesn’t consider him their prisoner or something. Another part of him is screaming at him to just accept what he’s being told and be thankful that this woman who could have just allowed him to die is willing to put faith in him.

“But I was a stormtrooper,” He says hesitantly, “Aren’t you afraid I might still think like one? That I could betray you?”

The General looks amused, her serious expression lifting at the corners, seeming almost to light up, if only slightly, “You risked everything to turn against the only life you’ve ever known and fight against them. I don’t doubt your loyalty.”

Finn isn’t sure how to respond to that. “Thank you” feels like too little, but he can’t seem to find the right words, so he just nods slowly and hopes he isn’t offending her.

“And,” She adds, collecting herself in a way that indicates she’s about to leave, “You saved the life of my best pilot. That definitely counts for something.”

Again, Finn wants to insist that he didn’t really, and that he’d nearly gotten her best pilot killed, but instead he forces himself to respond with a stilted “thank you.”

“I should be going now,” General Organa says, turning to leave, “Goodbye, Finn.”

* * *

 

Finn’s days spent in the medical unit while not completely comatose are surprisingly few in number. He’d slept through the worst days of his injuries, and by the time he had woken up his skin was already in the process of knitting itself back together. In the days after he wakes up, the pain in his back subsides little by little and the scars beneath his stitches are in less and less danger of reopening. He’s told by a doctor that the biggest concern had really been whether or not he would wake up, and he can’t decide if he’s unsettled or reassured to know that.

Poe visits more than anyone else, BB-8 always trailing behind him like a loyal pet. Finn is glad to have a friend, and even more glad that Poe apparently considers Finn a friend as well, and evidently has enough time on his hands to spend most of it hovering around the med unit and becoming a nuisance to the medical droids, who seem to grow irritable any time he enters the room now. He visits so often that he’s been pestered out by the droids three times in the span of four days. 

“Don’t you have somewhere to be?” Finn asks one afternoon, lying face down on his hospital bed, voice muffled by the thin sheets and springy mattress. He’s been awake for three days and boredom is setting in with a vengeance.

“Not really,” Poe says. He’s sitting sideways in a chair next to the bed, one hand reaching down to rest on BB-8’s head, “Since our big victory what’s left of the Order hasn’t exactly been able to make any moves. Means us pilots don’t have a lot to do.”

There’s an edge of restlessness to his voice. Finn knows that most of the time that Poe isn’t spending here, he spends doing whatever odd duty is assigned to him  or flying around aimlessly in his x-wing fighter. Sometimes Finn wonders if his friend would rather fill the hours he spends here with hours spent flying.

“Hm,” Finn half-snorts and turns his head so his nose isn’t being squished against a mattress spring, “I mean, I’m not judging you, but if it were me spending all my time in a hospital room with some guy wouldn’t be my first choice of activity.”

“Don’t sell yourself too short, buddy,” Poe says, “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t want to be.”

He sounds nothing less than totally sincere. Finn has to smile at that. 

* * *

 

When his wounds have healed enough and his pain has lessened enough that Finn is cleared to be released from the hospital, he doesn’t even have time to worry about where he’ll stay or if the Resistance will even let him stay before he finds himself as Poe’s roommate. 

Poe’s room is nothing spectacular, just a simple dorm with a single bed, a desk, a chair, a chest of drawers and a set of shelves, a closet, and a bathroom off to the side. Someone has moved a spare mattress with a set of plain sheets and a pillow into an open corner of the room, presumably for Finn to sleep on until…

Until what? It’s pretty clear that the current situation isn’t meant to be permanent, but Finn hasn’t considered what he plans to do long-term.

Standing in the doorway, he feels slightly embarrassed. Sharing a room is nothing new. For as long as he can remember up until he ran from the First Order, he’s lived in bunks with other stormtroopers. The self-consciousness comes from feeling like he’s invading someone else’s space. When he was a stormtrooper, everyone was an equal, everyone dressing the same, living the same, and owning the same things. Which is to say, owning nothing. 

In one hand, Finn holds a red and brown leather jacket with a hole in the shoulder and a gash in the back so big that the jacket would now be useless at doing what a jacket is meant to do. It’s everything he owns aside from the clothes he’s wearing, and even those are borrowed. He feels like an intruder taking up space that belongs to someone else. 

Poe motions for him to step out of the doorway and into the dorm, and probably says something, but Finn is too busy taking in the surroundings to really hear what he says. Poe’s room is sparsely decorated, but distinctly his, the occupant reflected in the unmade bed, the small model x-wing in one corner of the desk and tiny TIE fighter on the windowsill, and the pile of clothes accumulated at the foot of the bed. 

BB-8 rolls up behind Finn and bumps into the back of his leg impatiently, bringing him back down to earth. He lifts up his foot and nearly loses his balance when the droid rolls right under it, its head hitting the sole of his shoe.

“I’m assuming you won’t have trouble figuring out where everything is,” Poe says, shoving the clothing pile under the bed in an attempt to contain the mess, “It’s kind of a wreck right now, but it’s home.”

BB-8 beeps at its owner, who crouches down to pat it on its metal head like a small animal. When Poe looks up, his eyes go almost immediately to the jacket in Finn’s hand.

“You still have that?” He asks, raising an eyebrow slightly. Finn shrugs.

“Yeah,” he says, looking down at the now ruined jacket that had once belonged to Poe. It’s pretty much ruined now, but throwing it out would feel wrong, “I figured I’d fix it eventually.”

He doesn’t mention that it’s the only thing he owns.

“Make yourself at home,” Poe says. It’s a simple phrase, common courtesy and nothing more, but the words lodge themselves in Finn’s mind. He isn’t sure what to make of them.

* * *

The days go by quickly. Rey is still gone, and Finn forces himself not to dwell on it. He tells himself she’s safe, sometimes repeating it over and over to himself so often that he worries he might go nuts trying to keep himself from worrying. She’s not alone, he reminds himself. She’s got Chewie with her. And this is Rey he’s talking about. She can take care of herself. He hopes.

As his injuries heal, Finn begins to take on odd jobs around the base, picking up tasks wherever an extra hand is needed. It keeps his mind occupied and gives him something to do. Poe may have complained about a lack of excitement these days, but to Finn it seems as if there’s an endless list of things for him to do: everything from providing information about the First Order to helping mechanics with repairs to carrying boxes. He goes where he’s needed and does what he’s told needs doing. 

Everywhere he goes, he learns just how much he’d been missing out on.

He watches a group of pilots convening on the tarmac after a training mission one day, all chattering excitedly and laughing, commending each other on their flying and clapping each other on the backs. First order stormtroopers would never act this way, Finn thinks. As a stormtrooper, from the minute you’re old enough to begin real training, you’re expected to focus only on doing what you’re told and doing it right. The ones who fell short of expectations were simply left behind and that was that. Finn has never been casually told “nice shooting!” by another trooper, has never had anyone give him friendly hints when he didn’t quite meet expectations. He’s never celebrated a victory, let alone celebrated at the end of a training exercise. People here celebrate even the smallest victories. They smile easily. They crowd together and laugh and holler and loudly tell each other how great they did and don’t leave the ones who didn’t do so great in the dust.

Finn watches from a distance as Poe takes off his helmet and is immediately elbowed in the ribs jovially by another pilot. He does a lot of watching from a distance lately, he thinks.

Now more than ever, Finn feels a divide between himself and the Resistance. He’s making friends and learning people’s names and settling into his life here as best he can, sure. And despite his old First Order connections, people treat him like a hero. But every day he feels like he’s trapped behind a pane of glass, looking out on the world around him and beating on the surface in front of him in a desperate attempt to be a part of it, to make himself at home here.

* * *

“Guess you really are a big deal now, Big Deal,” Poe says through a mouthful of food as he and Finn eat breakfast. Finn nearly drops his fork in surprise at the nickname.

“Who told you about that?” He asks. The last person who’d called him that had been Han Solo, in response to his bald-faced lie about being a “big deal” in the Resistance.

Poe grins at him. “Word travels fast around here, buddy.”

“Guess I’ll be more careful what I say from now on,” Finn says.

Poe laughs, smiling in that easy, comfortable way that makes his eyes crinkle up at the corners and makes Finn feel fluttery and stupid like a starry-eyed teenager.  _ Well, shit.  _ He takes a sudden interest in shoving his breakfast around on the plate.

“So, how is it being a celebrity?” Poe asks, “Must be pretty overwhelming.”

Finn isn’t sure how to answer, exactly. He’s still getting used to even having a name of his own, let alone the fact that everyone he meets seems to already know it and everything he’s done since he ran away from the Order. (Granted, most people’s accounts are hardly accurate.) Everyone thinks they know the kind of person he is before they’ve even met him face-to-face, calling him brave, a hero, an inspiration. Finn isn’t even sure he knows the kind of person he is, doesn’t recognize the person in the stories people tell that are supposed to be about him.

“Whoa, you okay there?” Poe sounds concerned, “You got all quiet there.”

“Yeah, it’s just…” Finn shakes his head slightly, “It’s a lot to take in, you know? It’s hard to know where I fit into all of this.”

Poe nods his head in understanding, propping his chin up with his hand, thinking.

“What if I give you flying lessons?” He suggests, face lighting up like a sunburst.

Finn is tempted to say yes, not because he’s ever thought about piloting before or because he thinks he’ll be any good at it. But the way Poe talks about flying, like there’s no better feeling in the world, and the way he always seems so eager to be in the air. Then, Finn remembers who he’s talking to. This is Poe Dameron, best and most daring pilot in the Resistance. Poe Dameron, whose enthusiasm for taking risks borders on concerning. Poe Dameron, whose idea of fun is hurtling through space with only the walls of a cockpit separating him from a freezing void. Finn shudders, taking a mental count of how many times he’s been inside a ship, and then how many of those times had ended in a smooth landing. The statistics aren’t exactly wonderful.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but the last time I flew with you we both almost died,” He says, trying to find an excuse that won’t make him sound like a coward, “I think I’ll pass.”

“Harsh, but fair,” Poe laughs again, “We’ll figure something out.”

* * *

In his dreams, he’s back on Jakku. The sun beats down on the back of his neck and the leather jacket he’s wearing. Sweat drips down his face, into his eyes and mouth, obscuring his vision, slowly boiling him inside his clothing.

_ Finn.  _ He knows the voice. Whose is it? He knows, he’s sure of it, but the name of it’s owner evades him, slipping away as soon as he thinks he’s gotten hold of it.

_ Finn! _

“REY?” He yells, remembering now, wheeling around frantically, his voice coming out cracked and raspy like sun-baked mud, “REY, ARE YOU THERE?”

The only answer is the wind blowing sand across the rolling desert and the heat of the sun on his face. 

“HEY!” His voice  _ hurts _ , scraping against his throat like gravel, burning his lungs like acid. Water. He needs water.

A pillar of black smoke is rising in the distance, billowing up in dark clouds. Cold panic runs through his veins and every nerve in his body hisses angrily at him,  _ RUN.  _

He runs towards the smoke, but his lungs and muscles are white-hot with pain and the sand beneath his feet is sinking, sinking, sinking until it swallows him whole.

Everything goes dark. Dark and cold. He opens his eyes to tall, black trees and falling snow. Everything glows. Everything is bathed in red light.

A dark form looms over him.

_ TRAITOR,  _ it howls at him, its voice echoing in every direction around him. It vibrates through his bones. His blood boils.

Someone is screaming behind him (Rey, his brain tells him), and every instinct tells him to get the hell out of there, but his body won’t move. All he can do is stare down the dark from in front of him and watch as it raises its hand towards him.

The red light is so intense now that he feels it, buzzing on his skin like static. The screaming stops. 

He floats, weightless in some unknown point in space. From somewhere far away, someone is speaking softly, and he knows that whoever it is is speaking to him, but he doesn’t know why.

* * *

Finn wakes up disoriented and afraid, chest heaving and heart pounding.

“What the hell?” He breathes, mind reeling trying to piece together what he’d just seen. Just a dream. It was just a freaky, messed up dream. He wipes sweat from his brow with his forearm, focusing his eyes on the ceiling with a model x-wing suspended from a string above his head. He breathes a sigh, feeling more like he’s in his own body. 

The room is deserted. He notices it as he drags himself up off the floor and rubs sleep out of his eyes. Details of the day before come back to him slowly.

_ Jess Pava’s serious voice that didn’t match the look on her face. _

_ “General Organa wants to talk to us, Dameron.” _

Finn brushes his teeth and splashes freezing cold water on his face.

_ “Guess who’s finally getting some excitement!” _

_ Poe’s smile sends Finn’s chest fluttering like a winged animal let loose inside his ribcage. Get it together. _

Finn dresses carefully, wincing when he puts a little too much strain on his back.

_ “Shouldn’t be long, but you’ll have the room to yourself tonight.” _

Oh. Right. Poe was sent out on some classified mission last night. Good for him, Finn thinks. He’d been getting antsy lately, always looking for excuses to take to the sky for any amount of time.

Finn feels a pang of something like jealousy but not quite so bitter. He’s no pilot. If anything, the idea of flying scares him more than it attracts him, but he can’t shake the sense that he should be doing something other than hovering around the base, hopping from place to place.

* * *

Poe returns from wherever he had been a few hours later, looking tired and a little more banged up than he had when he left yesterday, but smiling nonetheless.

He isn’t allowed to give out information about where he and the other pilots had been, or what they’d been doing there.

A small group of young pilots corner Poe and Jessika (and, by extension, Finn) in the mess hall while they eat dinner, trying to grill them about where they had been sent to.

“Hoth,” Jess deadpans.

“Classified,” Poe answers honestly, “That’s all you’re allowed to know. General’s orders.”

(Finn is silently glad that for once he’s not the one being bombarded by questions.)

Sleep doesn’t come easily that night. As much as he doesn’t want to admit to being shaken by something like a weird dream, Finn isn’t eager for a repeat of last night. He lies awake in the darkness, turning over and over and over, tangling the thin sheets around him, staring up at the shape of the model x-wing dangling above his head.

“Can’t sleep?”

Finn turns his head to see what he can only assume is the shape of Poe sitting upright on his bed.

“Yeah,” He admits, “Did I wake you up?”

“No,” Poe says, “I’ve been up this whole time.”

“Oh…” Finn trails off, thinking there’s something more he should say but not sure what it is.

“Hey,” Poe says, “Can I ask you something?”

Finn sits up.

“Go ahead,” He says, wondering where this conversation is going.

“Do you… You don’t remember your family, do you?” 

The words seem to fall heavily to the floor like a stone being dropped.

“No,” Finn says, “I don’t remember them.”

“Sorry if it’s a sore subject. I was just... I don’t know.”

“It’s fine,” Finn says, almost surprised at how easy it is for him to talk about it, how the words seem to come so naturally, “I don’t even know anything about them. Their names, who they were, where they lived. I was an infant. I don’t even know if I was taken by force or if they made the choice themselves.”

Finn pauses, waiting for a response. When he doesn’t get one, he starts talking again, almost against his will. The words just flow out of him as easy as breathing.

“I don’t… I never really got a chance to feel sad about it, you know? Not in the way I think I should. I came to terms with it a long time ago. That I’ll never know them.”

“Does that not seem messed up to you?” Poe wonders. It might sound rude or accusatory coming from anyone else, but not the way Poe says it.

“Everything about it is messed up,” Finn says, “But it’s all I knew. When I first learned that there were people out there who had families, who knew where they came from, I thought… I don’t know. I thought it would hurt more, I guess.”

“Can’t really blame someone for not missing people they never got to know,” Poe says slowly, taking in what Finn is saying.

“Can I ask you something?” Finn tries.

“Hm?”

“Why do you want to know?”

Poe breathes a long sigh, and in the darkness Finn sees the silhouette of him running a hand through his hair.

“Couldn’t sleep,” He says, “Just sitting here in the dark wasn’t helping.”

“Hm.” 

Finn can relate. He relaxes slightly, lying back down. Something about knowing that he isn’t alone in the dark is reassuring.

When sleep comes to him finally, he finds himself back in the desert.

This time, however, he isn’t so afraid.

He’s watching something in the sky above him, a shape that moves across the blue expanse like something gliding through water. It dips and glides and doubles back in complicated loops and turns. 

“Finn,” Rey’s voice is more solid this time, like she’s standing next to him rather than calling to him from somewhere far away. He feels someone’s hand in his and turns to find his friend by his side, her head wrapped in a scarf with a pair of battered goggles resting on her forehead.

He tries to say something back to her, but the words catch in his throat and his voice simply doesn’t make a sound.

“Look up,” She says to him, pointing a finger to the shape in the sky.

The sound of a fighter grows louder and louder as he looks away from Rey. The shape he’d been watching is closer now: an orange-and-black x-wing hurtling through the air above him. The pilot dives, going down, down, down, so close to crashing that Finn is sure something awful is about to happen before pulling up and shooting skyward again like a rocket being sent into space. He careens towards the ground again and again, each time leveling off and launching himself upwards again, sometimes flying so close to the people on the ground that Finn is sure that the pilot is doing it just to mess with him.

“He’s doing this on purpose,” He says, grinning without knowing why. He turns to Rey, only she’s not there anymore. The feeling of her hand in his seems to melt away the same way it had appeared. He looks around, trying to call out for her to find that his voice has stopped working again.

_ Look up. _

He looks up again, seeing a second fighter, nearly identical to the first. There she is, he thinks, flying away. He doesn’t know what makes him feel with such certainty that it’s Rey up there in the x-wing that seems to have materialized out of nowhere, just that he can feel it. He can feel it like an invisible thread connecting them. She’s leaving. The second fighter, Rey’s fighter, isn’t looping and diving the way the first one is. She flies it straight and slow, slow, so slow Finn wonders if she’s even flying it at all. It’s almost as if she’s floating away in zero gravity, just drifting farther and farther away from him.

_ Wait! _ He wants to shout,  _ Where are you going? _

The words scrape and claw at his lungs, catching in his throat, refusing to come out. The sand sinks around his feet the way it had the night before, and he shuts his eyes, expecting to open them to nothingness and a voice whispering from somewhere too far away to hear. 

Instead, he opens his eyes to find himself in freefall, his body hurtling downwards and the desert below growing closer and closer.

* * *

The strange dreams don’t go away. If anything, they become more frequent. The content is always different in some way, things playing out differently, different details in the surroundings. But in every one of them, his friends can fly. In every one, he is on the ground or falling down towards it.

They aren’t always nightmares, but the ones that are unsettle Finn enough to plant a nagging apprehension about falling asleep inside him that tugs at his insides and messes with his head when night falls and he’s laying on his makeshift bed in Poe’s room.

His solution becomes to sleep less. 

Poe keeps him company. After the first night they’d shared in their sleeplessness, when Poe had asked Finn about his family, they start to talk more like this. Not always about heavy things. More often, they just converse idly about trivial matters: gossip among the pilots (Poe is well-versed), likes and dislikes, goings-on around the base, anything that might make for decent conversation. Poe is easy to talk to, Finn finds. He listens intently, laughs easily, and neither pries nor seems uninterested. So when the conversation does make its way into personal territory, when he asks about the First Order, it isn’t so hard to answer.

And when Finn doesn’t feel like talking, when he’s tired from the day’s work or shaken by nightmares or simply just unwilling to carry a conversation, Poe has plenty of words to fill the silence. Poe likes to talk, Finn learns. He’s not content to sit in silence if he can help it. Says he doesn’t like too much quiet, that it’s suffocating, that when things get too quiet at night he can’t sleep. 

(“That’s kind of a new thing,” He admits with a short and almost bitter laugh that for once carries no real humor, “I’ve got Kylo Ren’s force torture bullshit to thank for that, I think.”)

No matter what, Poe always finds something to talk about, something to cut through the suffocating quiet. He tells Finn about his mother, a former pilot who had died when her son was eight years old but had still had time to pass on her talent and love for flying, a force of nature more than someone Finn could really envision in his head as a real person. He tells his father’s old recycled war stories (His mother hadn’t been the type to tell hers), or he tells his own. Finn hears the mix of panic and almost frantic excitement in Poe’s voice as he recounts the time he and two other pilots had narrowly escaped two Star Destroyers and countless TIE fighters while severely outgunned and outmanned. More than anything, he tells stories of just flying. Not even of dogfights or thrilling battles. Just  _ being _ , soaring through space as a pilot for the Resistance, or as a commander in the Republic’s navy. A teenager speeding alone through the sky in a ship his mother left when she died. A child sitting in the cockpit of a fighter on his mother’s lap with her hands over his on the controls, his first ever flying lessons. It’s obvious from his words that Poe feels the most at home inside his x-wing. Sure, on the ground he’s still a big deal, practically General Organa’s right hand man and the guy everyone seems to want to be around. But there’s something about Poe in the air. It’s where he’s most himself. Finn remembers their escape from the First Order in the stolen TIE fighter, how he seemed ecstatic despite their situation, grinning like a maniac every time Finn looked over his shoulder.

“Why?” Finn asks him, “What is it about flying that you like so much?”

Poe is quiet for a minute in the dark room, thinking through the question.

“It’s what I know best,” He says finally, “I learned so long ago it’s almost like I was born knowing. I can’t really explain what makes me like it, I just know that when I’m up there, it’s where I belong.”

Where he belongs. The phrase stands out to Finn and he takes it and rolls it around over and over in his mind. Poe says it so casually, as if he expects Finn to relate or even understand at all the feeling he’s describing. 

Finn has never belonged anywhere. Even as a stormtrooper, the leader of his fire-team, a cut above all his peers, even with Captain Phasma singling him out among all the others as an example of what a trooper should be, he felt out of place.

_ “You’re the outsider,”  _ a trooper had told him on his first deployment,  _ “You’ll always be looking in and wondering why you don’t fit in.” _

It had never been about belonging. It was just following orders, doing as you were told and doing it right because… because… because it was the only thing to do. It was never a question of being one of them, because nobody had ever asked. He finds himself thinking about Slip, FN-2003, for the first time in a long time.

_ “He’s one of us,” _ He’d said. And it was true. Slip was one of them, despite his incompetence and lack of skill and knack for always being one step behind his peers. But FN-2187, with his near-perfect accuracy and unrivaled skill in combat and personal praise from Phasma, somehow had never been. He had never belonged there, and he’d always known it in some part of himself, long before his first deployment, long before FN-2187 became Finn.

“Where do I belong?” Finn doesn’t say. He only yawns, closes his eyes and pretends to sleep.

* * *

Still, life goes on. Finn is so busy with his own daily life and the odd jobs people give him to do that he’s almost surprised when he looks up one day and is reminded again that he’s part of a war that he was once on the other side of.

Jess Pava comes back from a reconnaissance mission with a damaged x-wing and news that the First Order is once again rearing its head and growing bolder for the first time since the destruction of Starkiller Base. All at once, the mood around the base changes and for the first time, Finn finds himself wishing there were more hours in the day because he’s so busy with the work he’s given. He sees less of Poe during the day now; With more rumors of increased First Order activity comes more chances to be sent out to keep tabs on the situation. In spite of this, the two seem to grow closer together with every passing day.

Whether by chance or fate or the force (If that’s how it works. Finn isn’t sure.), Finn feels drawn to Poe like a gravitational pull. He’s a constant, something steady and familiar to hold onto when nothing else seems solid, when he feels sure the world he’s found himself in is going to sink under his feet and swallow him whole like the desert in his dreams.

At night they sit together on the floor now, with their backs against the bed, shoulder-to-shoulder when they used to just lay on their opposite sides of the room and let their conversations bridge the gap between them instead of doing it themselves. Finn watches the model x-wing dangle over his mattress from across the room and imagine it falling from its wire and taking flight inside the room. He tries to imagine being its pilot to take his mind off of how much he wants to lean in closer and bridge whatever gap is left between him and this person sitting beside him.

Finn knows what this is. He knows he’s heading for uncharted territory. Hell, he entered uncharted territory a long time ago. His cheeks feel hot and his palms feel sweaty. Get a grip, he tells himself. This is only going to make things more complicated.

So it comes as a surprise when Poe meets him halfway, kisses him one night without any warning or introduction, quick and clumsy like a snap decision he’s worried could backfire on him at second. It lasts barely more than five seconds before he pulls away, and Finn feels himself moving forward vaguely and then they’re kissing again, properly this time. He feels Poe laugh against his lips.

* * *

He dreams he’s in the desert again, watching the sky. An orange-and-black x-wing and Han Solo’s old freighter fly overhead, ducking and diving and rocketing skyward, turning and looping and doubling back, leaving trails across the crystal blue sky.

He knows somehow, that Rey and Poe are the pilots. And he knows, without being able to explain why, that they know he’s watching them from the ground.

A form materializes in front of him, small and wiry, with arms bound in strips of cloth, a face wrapped in sturdy beige fabric, and eyes obscured by a pair of goggles. She reaches her arm towards him, hand outstretched, waiting.  _ Follow me.  _

The ground sinks around his feet, pulling him down the way it always does, trying to swallow him like always. This time, however, he’s ready for it. He wills his legs to run forward, forward, forward, as fast as he can, towards his friend who is waiting for him.

He looks up as he runs. The ships are ahead of him, speeding in a straight line across the sky now, side by side. He won’t lose them this time, won’t be left behind. He won’t sink, not again. 

A little farther now, just a little farther. 

Almost there. Just a few more steps and he reaches his arm out. Rey’s outstretched hand seems to phase through his, and he nearly falls on his face as he runs straight through the spot where she used to be. His heart pounds in his chest like always, but the burning in his lungs is absent.

The ships are suspended in midair, just floating directly above Finn. He reaches his hands up as if to brush the underside of them with his fingertips, breathing hot air into his lungs and feeling the light of Jakku’s sun on his face, the burn of it welcome and warm, not harsh and punishing the way it always seems to be in real life or in other dreams. He shuts his eyes to block out the light.

He hears voices whispering to him from somewhere far away. Stars dot his vision and he feels as if he’s been pulled through a portal into some empty part of space, but he still feels the sun on his skin, hears the hum of engines overhead. There is no sand, no sun in sight, no ground beneath his feet. He hears the voices clearer now. They’re words he’s heard before, like audio pulled out of memories in his head. He feels lighter, almost weightless. He breathes evenly and easily even with no atmosphere to breathe in.

* * *

Finn doesn’t know much about the force. It’s too abstract of a concept for him to fully wrap his head around if he’s being honest, the idea that there’s an all-encompassing…  _ thing  _ that runs through all things and connects it all together. It makes his head hurt trying to make sense of it.

He can understand connections, though. Pulls away and pulls towards, like strings connecting him to points on a map. He names the points in his head like he’s highlighting locations and placing a marker to set a course. Towards Rey, towards Poe, towards the other friends he’s made here in the Resistance. He names a point for the First Order, just to remind himself of where he’s been. He begins to map out a place in the world for himself, each point on his map a part of his universe.

There are still nightmares, still nights that his mind won’t rest and he goes without sleeping at all, still days when he feels lost and out of place, days when he wonders what he’s doing in the Resistance and what he believes in and what he’s fighting for. And maybe there will always be part of him that feels that way, but slowly, slowly, he begins to feel at home.

Home, he realizes, is not a single point on his map. It isn’t a location with a name. Not for him, at least. It’s something abstract and subject to change. He begins to see home as a different thing for everyone he meets. A ship, a planet, a room, a feeling. 

The Resistance itself isn’t his home. He wants to fight the First Order, sure. He believes in the cause as much as he can when he’s spent his whole life being brainwashed to believe in the opposite, but the cause isn’t what pulls him here. It's the people he cares about, the things they believe in. They're what pulls him towards this and what keeps him here along with the need to do what's right.

Finn makes a home for himself in other people, in the friends he makes and the people he loves. He places markers on his map and connects each person back to himself, setting a course towards home, towards somewhere he belongs.

**Author's Note:**

> This started off as entirely finn-centric with no romance but I read all of before the awakening yesterday and wanted to get some stuff related to poe's backstory in here and the romance just kind of happened on its own so this is what you get. like i said please go easy on me with star wars terminology and stuff if i fucked up on my lore i'm not an expert.


End file.
